Agencies bet on synthetic audiences to replace real consumer data
Source: Digiday
As third-party cookie deprecation tightens data access, agencies and their clients are increasingly using AI-generated audiences as planning inputs—a pragmatic workaround that trades real consumer behavior for computational efficiency. This inverts the historical tension between data quality and scale: marketers are now choosing speed and controllability over ground truth, which can mask real market shifts and lock them into feedback loops where synthetic patterns reinforce initial assumptions rather than challenge them.